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45. Lovesong

Thoughts of you warm my bonesI’m on the way, I’m on the phoneLet’s get lost, me and youAn ocean and a rock is nothing to me

Lisa Hannigan, Ocean and a Rock

Pouring out your heart in print is undeniably cathartic; it can also be very clarifying. Life happens to us in a chaotic jumble, it all makes a kind of sense at the time but, as we move away from each moment, it becomes blurred and indistinct. I would compare looking back upon our lives as somewhat akin to listening to a band from outside of the venue; it’s kind of impressionistic.

That’s where writing stuff down comes in handy.

In attempting to create a cogent narrative for these posts, I have needed to be able to look back at each event and relive it in my mind (the accompanying emotions at least, if not every physical detail). I’ve found that as I write, the memories become less clouded.

That is the point at which the patterns of my life begin to reveal themselves. I start to see the connections between things that I hadn’t quite noticed before and I begin then to hear the music of life.

Through this process, I was easily able to pinpoint the moment when one ‘song’ ended and the next began. For me, a song reflecting a somewhat resigned life of solitude came to an abrupt stop the moment I read a comment on an online thread. I didn’t know it at the time but nothing was going to be the same after that. I had just met Jersey girl.

The song that followed that moment had an entirely different tempo, beat, and intensity. Whereas mine had been a quiet, somber ballad of the Devils and dust variety, our song was more a euphoric foot stomper of the Meet me in the city school; grizzled and ambiguous tones replaced by soaring harmonies and appealing hooks.

I do not mean to trivialize the emotions we experienced as we learned our parts. Quite the contrary, music is to me humanity’s greatest achievement and when I compare our love to a song, I’m affording it the deepest respect.

That is why music features so heavily on this blog about love. For me, the two are absolutely inseparable.

What follows then, is a small selection of tracks from the mixtape to our story. If they seem a little melancholy, can you be surprised? After all, we live most of the time a world apart.

(I know that I described our song as a euphoric foot stomper but that doesn’t mean that the tracks we listen to when we are missing each other are also of that sort)